So getting rid of the SRBs was a good sign. And—

And suddenly there was a second contrail in the sky, spider-web thin, climbing up from the south-west.

She heard some muttering from the press stand behind her. “What the hell can that be? A chase plane?”

But there were no chase planes during a launch. The whole area was supposed to be kept clear.

It was difficult to follow the track, through the breaks in the cloud deck. But it looked to Jackie’s inexpert eye as if that second trail was heading straight for the climbing Shuttle stack.

“NASA have confirmed SRB sep, Linebacker.”

“Rog.”

At this point in its ascent profile Endeavour was climbing towards Mach Four, Deeke knew — but even so the X-15 was outrunning it. It was the only aircraft in the world which could have done so.

Now there was one more decision point, one more gate to pass through.

It took one more second for the confirmation to come.

“Linebacker, you are go to deploy. Repeat, go to deploy.”

The pure oxygen in his helmet seemed to have turned his mouth dry as Mojave dust.

“Linebacker, do you copy? You are go to deploy.”

“…Affirm, Canaveral. Copy that. Go to deploy.”

There was one major addition to the X-15 control panel, a small flip-up softscreen display. Deeke reached forward and lifted this now. It showed a schematic gunsight, and a bright starburst, representing the Shuttle, over to the left of the screen.

He took the RCS control in his left hand. The reaction control system was a set of simple hydrogen peroxide rockets. Deeke used the system in bang-bang mode, where he just pulsed the RCS rockets by shoving at the control stick. When he didn’t get the response he wanted, he applied another impulse. And he took care to move in just one axis at a time, to keep control.

In stages, blipping his RCS, he turned the nose of the X-15 as it soared through its ballistic profile. All Deeke had to do now was to center the Shuttle starburst in the little toy gunsight.

Point and shoot.

After a couple of minutes, still closing on Endeavour, he got the starburst centered.

It was a firing solution.

The digital display came up with a small qwerty keypad, for him to punch in an enabling code.

He held his gloved hand over the pad.

His whole life hung on this moment, the actions he took in the next few seconds.

Somehow, although he’d rehearsed it, in simulations and in his head, he’d never quite believed he’d have to face this. All he’d really wanted was a way to get back into the cockpit of an X-15, one last time, before he subsided into old age.

“Canaveral. Do I still have go for deploy?”

“Linebacker, you have go for deploy. Repeat—”

“Affirm.”

He thought of the blank faces of the ground crew and suit techs, of Hartle sitting like a spider in its web at the heart of Cheyenne.

What right did Deeke have to entertain doubts? What right did he have to oppose such certainty?

His hesitation melted away. He tapped in the code with confident keystrokes. He could barely feel the pad through his thick gloves.

He felt a solid clunk beneath him. That would be the pyrotechnic bolts severing the ASAT from its berth in the belly of the X-15, and pushing it away.

It was done.

For a moment he heard and felt nothing else. The X-15 continued to arc upwards through its ballistic profile, climbing towards its peak altitude of two hundred thousand feet. His attitude was drifting off a little; he would have to correct it…

There was a burst of yellow-white light beneath him.

He could see a slim pencil, trailing a blob of fire and billowing smoke, white and clean, like the smoke from the Shuttle’s own solid rocket boosters.

Deeke corrected his attitude drift with blips from his RCS. He lifted his nose, so that the horizon was hidden by the sill of his window. He didn’t particularly want to witness the last act of this drama, when it came.

He closed up the little digital pad; it had served its purpose, and had no further function.

The ASAT arced away from him, towards the sunlit horizon, over the lumpy cloud.

“Smooth as glass, Houston. To software mode 103…”

With the solid boosters discarded, Endeavour was driven upwards solely by her main engines, the External Tank feeding propellants through its connecting pipes. The ride became easier; liquid boosters provided a much smoother thrust than solids. The whole stack seemed to purr, like some huge sewing machine, every part working in harmony with the rest.

Benacerraf found herself grinning, the exhilaration of the launch getting to her.

Way to go,she thought. Way to go.

The ASAT, developed by Boeing in the Reagan years, had been in storage for two decades.

Now, called upon at last, it functioned perfectly.

If was actually a three-stage solid-propellant rocket. It controlled its attitude using three large moveable fins on its tail. It carried an infra-red sensor and eight small telescopes to help locate its target. It was intelligent, to some degree, containing an on-board computer and a laser gyro.

The first stage fell away, and the smaller second stage burned briefly, accelerating the ASAT to many multiples of the speed of sound.

Then the second stage was discarded.

The ASAT was designed for airborne launch, primarily from an F-15, and was actually capable of knocking satellites out of low Earth orbit. So it was overdesigned for this particular mission. That was not seen as a problem, by the mission planners.

The final stage of the ASAT was basically a smart projectile, which would use the momentum imparted by the rocket boosters to hurl itself at its target. It spun itself up now, and used the fifty-six small rockets in its outer hull to obey its guidance system and keep it on its course. It carried no explosive; it was designed to destroy its target by direct collision, impacting with the force of a shell from a battleship’s main gun.

It closed rapidly on the infra-red glow it perceived before it. But the target was large, complex, with many sources of heat; accuracy would be difficult to achieve.

There was a bang: loud, deep, solid.

The flight deck shuddered, over and above the usual rattling of equipment and loose gear.

Benacerraf was startled. She remembered nothing like this from the sims, or her first flight.

Libet turned to Angel, her mouth open. “What was that?”

Marcus White called up with a routine message. “Endeavour, you have two-engine transatlantic abort capability.”

Angel said, “Copy, two-engine TAL.” His voice was flat, the response automatic; Benacerraf could see that his attention was focused on a main engine status display. “Houston, Endeavour. I think we might have a situation here. I’m reading a climb in the fuel pump operating temperature, on main engine number one.”

“Endeavour,Houston. Say again.”

“I have a multisensor fuel pump temp rise on engine one.”

“Copy that, Endeavour. Stand by…”

Tell me this isn’t happening, Barbara Fahy thought.

In her mind she replayed those final, stunning pictures from the big FCR screens, over and over again: the remote, blurred image of the Shuttle stack still rising smoothly, with the SRBs slowly diverging — and then that shocking incursion from the edge of the picture, a second contrail that had cut obliquely across the complex shape of the orbiter.

Some asshole shot at us.

I still can’t believe this is happening, she thought. Who the hell would try to shoot down a Space Shuttle? The Chinese, maybe?

The controller called Booster was trying to get her attention. “Flight, Booster. Flight.”